Defamation case: Apex court gives BJP leader 6 weeks to reply on CM Atishi, Kejriwal plea

The Supreme Court on Tuesday gave six weeks to a Delhi BJP leader to respond to a petition filed by Delhi Chief Minister Atishi and AAP leader Arvind Kejriwal seeking quashing of a defamation case against them for their alleged remarks on deletion of the voters’ names.

A Bench led by Justice Hrishikesh Roy deferred the hearing after complainant Rajiv Babbar’s counsel sought more time to file his response.

The top court had on September 30, 2024 issued a notice to Babbar on the AAP leaders’ petition and stayed the proceedings before the trial court.

Babbar said he filed the complaint as the authorised representative of the BJP, while bringing on record a January 16, 2019 authorisation letter.

On behalf of Babbar, senior advocate Sonia Mathur had earlier submitted the alleged statements were defamatory in nature as they lowered the party’s credibility amongst voters.

Senior counsel Abhishek Singhvi, representing Atishi and Kejriwal, submitted that nowhere in the complaint Babbar projected how his reputation was lowered in the estimation of others.

The statements in question were made a few months before Parliamentary elections and those ought to be taken as part of the political discourse by the respective political parties fighting elections, Singhvi submitted.

The top court said the legal question was whether the complainant or a political party would be covered under the definition of “aggrieved persons” within Section 199 of the Code of Criminal Procedure as it would require scrutiny.

“In a democratic nation like India, freedom of speech is a fundamental right guaranteed under Article 19(1)(a) of the Constitution. Therefore, a defamatory complaint under Section 499 of the IPC must necessarily be made by an ‘aggrieved person’ under Section 199 of the CrPC. As such, the threshold has to be higher than usual, especially in the context of public discourse amongst political personalities and parties,” the court said.

The top court observed the threshold for placing reasonable restrictions on the freedom of speech and expression was indeed “very high” and several of its verdicts held that there existed a presumption in favour of the accused.

Atishi and Kejriwal have challenged the September 2 order of the Delhi High Court refusing to quash the proceedings against them and other AAP leaders over their remarks on alleged deletion of voters’ names.

Babbar alleged that the allegation prima facie lowered the reputation of the BJP.

The Delhi High Court had dismissed the plea filed by Atishi, Kejriwal, former Rajya Sabha MP Sushil Kumar Gupta and AAP leader Manoj Kumar, challenging the defamation proceedings pending before the trial court, saying the imputations were prima facie “defamatory” and intended to vilify the BJP.

The imputations were prima facie “defamatory”, with an intention of vilifying the BJP and gaining undue political mileage, the High Court had said.